Name: A History of Horror, Fear, and the Uncanny
Rating: 4.09 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9798217134281

1,204 reviews504 followers

June 14, 2026

Dorling Kindersley has produced a useful introductory and chronological account of humanity's engagement with the horrible or terrible unknown and its expression in art and culture. It also includes nods to psychology although not enough to tell us much of depth.

The great virtue of the book is that it brings matters right up to date (2026) even if this means that some judgements may not stand the test of time. It also provides some access, otherwise not easily available, to horror from non-Western sources, notably Latin America.

It is a popular book covering a vast period of time with something of a concentration on relatively recent cinema and (much less so) literature so the coverage is fairly shallow if well illustrated. Its best use is as a check-list for the younger newcomer or as something to up date the old-timer.

A far more useful tool for the reasonably educated reader is probably Luckhurst's 2022 illustrated history of the Gothic (reviewed elsewhere by me) which, although it misses early periods and the breadth of the DK compendium, is more fundamentally educative if a little 'woke' in places.

There are important gaps in the DK text and some repetitions as well as some over-estimations of value for what must be 'politically correct' reasons but it would be churlish to go too far down that route. A text that does not mention Thomas Ligotti is by definition relatively superficial.

Still, it has value although that value will drift with time if it is not constantly updated and revised. It also, to its credit, refuses to bowdlerise its subject matter so that we have short chapters on the French Extremity and Torture Porn movements in cinema.

It raised some questions for me about how the sentiments of horror, terror, fear and unease have become increasingly performative. Extremity is now more inclined to evoke disgust and so becomes no better than putting your hand into faeces as the public gets immured within its artistic myths.

Psychologically the real question for our time is why our culture seems to want to wallow in disgust (and the horror at of things rather than the terror of those things) and to have lost its sense of the uneasy and the uncanny except as formulaic ghost stories for Christmas.

We watch Universal and Hammer monsters in a state of happy nostalgia, often repeatedly, and, even if we do not, we believe we know them inside out. Folk horror, zombie and vampire films are now exercises in mythic repetition, sometimes precisely so in Eggers' recent 'Nosferatu'.

The book indicates just how much something that one once found at the margins of one's existence occasionally and so struck a chord has become normalised to the point where (as I found a couple of times recently) you end up actually chuckling at a filmmaker's attempts to evoke primal feeling.

The idea of horror as comedy too has shifted from the attempt to relax the nerves from real fears via Abbott and Costello to even more performative entertainment that (as in the brilliant 'Ready or Not' (2019)) is much closer to the complexity of the cosy crime novel but with added gore.

Sometimes, as in Jordan Peele's much over-praised 'Get Out' (which is just a weak version of 'The Stepford Wives'), there is really just one idea being worked out - a didactic point of view designed to incur knowing approval at the 'message'. Horror is not really about too obvious social messaging.

Gore and elaborate deaths have replaced thought in many cases, often rather brilliantly and amusingly, as with the 'Final Destination' run of movies which are unaccountably absent from the book. Again, the emotion is amused disgust in a safe space rather than true horror.

Minus the gore we have, of course, vampires as children's entertainment (as in 'Count Duckula') and Tim Burton taking the horrors of Poe and early nineteenth century romanticism and turning them into delightful if sometimes twee animated entertainments.

Japanese and French extremity and torture porn (following some visceral late twentieth century extremities in art) tried to push the boundaries only to see these also turned into long-running franchises that have become cinematic safe spaces - as slasher movies have done before them.

The oddity in all this (or perhaps it is connected) is that visual media and reporting have brought real viscerality (possibly starting with Vietnam but more likely with footage of Nazi horrors) into the home and perhaps we see similar desensitisation with only a minority truly engaged in the horror.

Even looking away would be a reaction but I would guess that most watchers of TV footage of buildings being blown up and people digging in the rubble simply look with minimal emotion beyond their making a performative comment or adopting a more intellectual position that takes sides.

Maybe this is where we are as a culture - performative engagement and position-taking in everything. The posturing around Gaza as if the posturing changed anything. The two hours watching a slasher that turns the tables and meets feminist or ethnic political demands. So that's alright then.

Meanwhile the world trundles on - most people facing normal horrors like accidents and disease or seeing glitches in their brain matrix out of the corners of their eyes. In certain places and times there are monstrous deeds by monstrous people that we really do not want to face except ritualistically.

As you go through the book, you see a major shift from 'true belief' in things of horror (ancestors, demonic forces), with associated fear and unease, being displaced by a collapse of such belief and its replacement by the desire to be shaken into feeling by formulae that follow certain patterns.

The feelings must not be omnipresent in the dark but must be contained within texts and time-slots and both be referential backwards yet also novel - new black horror, eco-horror, feminist horror, LGBTQ+ horror or whatever - asserting something in the world rather than facing the world.

There are important exceptions that existentially draw us back towards ourselves and allow us to look at how we relate to the world in terms of such sentiments (we think of 'Under The Skin') but a lot of 'horror' today is manufactured to manage sentiments so that we should only think what we are told.

Since extremity (which probably emerged with 'Night of the Living Dead', the innovative slashers of the 1970s and Barker's 'Books of Blood') has probably exhausted itself (at least within the bounds of the law), where do we go from here since De Sade probably said all that needed to be said?

'Night of the Living Dead' is a good example. When I saw it as a student in a cinema in the late 1970s, I was truly horrified by the scene of a zombie eating the intestines of another human being. It was a unique moment, like my first sight much younger of the exposed brain of a Nazi experimental subject.

Now, such shocks are normalised and seen by younger and younger people who know all about F/X and prosthetics and who have been culturally trained to see 'horror' as just another cultural artefact that has no connection to the 'possible real' but only the 'formulaic imagined'.

It is a parallel development to comedy where we find little broadcast even fifty years ago to be funny (Spike Milligan's racism now look obscene) and older generations find younger 'comedians' to be little more than snide political ranters filled with cocky self importance.

We can always go back to Shelley, Poe, Stoker, Mr James, Henry James, Lovecraft and a few other masters of the past because they created the mythos in which Mike Flanagan and Guillermo del Toro flourish where others produce mere formulae. But surely these are now becoming exhausted.

Barker, Macarthy, Kiernan, Campbell, Ligotti and Vandermeer perhaps should be the masters of the next phase instead of mere extremity but none are well served visually. Their literary efforts rely on the imagined. Horror, terror, fear and unease, it seems, are always best imagined and not shown.

We sit there now, almost able to predict the next cinematic 'jump scare', amused and admiring when there is a new trivial twist on the 'final girl', knowing as the zombies are placed in another apparently unusual setting. 'Found footage' is my personal bugbear of total laziness.

So, what next? This book will not give you the answer to that question as producers now trawl the catalogue for franchise reboots (some actually very good), create new twists and variations on well worn themes and look constantly backwards to feed dedicated streaming channels.

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A History of Horror, Fear, and the Uncanny

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